In the next 30 to 40 years, past changes in fertility and mortality will lead to a significant increase in the share of the elderly. This study suggests that these demographic trends may lead to a decline in the G–7 private savings rate after 2000, compounding the impact of social expenditure pressures on the government's deficit. Moreover, public pensions may decline as a share of the consumption needs of the elderly, leading to financial pressures to reduce their consumption. The reduced burden of child support on the working population will not offset the increased burden of societal support for the elderly.

Twenty years ago the publication of Toward a Social Report by the United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare was hailed as a major forward step in developing indicators of conditions in society into a national system of social accounting of relevance to public policy. The resulting social indicators movement quickly mobilized able social scientists to produce a variety of indicators monitoring trends in their society, and internationally. National governments too began to sponsor new types of social reports. The years since have seen an apparent decline in the momentum of the social indicators movement. Hence, to evaluate developments, the Journal of Public Policy invited a number of distinguished pioneers in the movement in Europe and America to give their individual assessment of what has happened to social indicators.

In assessing whether or not harmonisation is an appropriate policy goal for a social dimension to the European Community, the article compares different aspects of employment conditions, practices and legislation in member states to see the extent to which these converge or diverge. The thesis is that harmonisation for the most part depends on whether convergence already exists in specific aspects of the member states' labour markets. If there is considerable divergence, then it will be practically impossible to obtain harmonisation without highly disruptive and far-reaching policy changes by some member states, changes which may not necessarily yield them beneficial results.

Government uses a wide variety of instruments to reach its policy goals, ranging from indirect methods, such as moral suasion and cash inducements, to more direct ones involving government provision of services. Although there has been a fair amount of writing on the nature and use of various policy instruments, there is very little work on either the meaning ascribed to these instruments by the decisionmakers who use them (or the experts who design them) or the processes by which some come to be favored over others. Characteristics of the political system, such as national policy style, the organizational setting of the decisionmaker, and the problem situation are all likely to have some influence over the choice of instruments. The relative impact of these variables, however, is likely to be mediated by subjective factors linked to cognition. Perceptions of the proper ‘tool to do the job’ intervenes between context and choice in a complex way. Efforts to account for variation in instrument choice, then, must focus not only on macro level variables but on micro ones as well.

Privatization is an idea that is popular among political elites throughout the advanced industrial world. In Britain, it has been the centrepiece of Margaret Thatcher's three Conservative governments, reflected in the sale of publicly-owned industries to the private sector and in the sale of council houses to their tenants. Using survey data, this article tests two models to account for privatization policy. The median voter model argues that it was a policy demanded and initiated by voters, while the elite interests model argues that it stemmed from the government and that little popular demand existed for it. The evidence confirms the elite interests model and shows that public opinion has generally accepted the status quo on the public ownership of industry. In addition, the Conservatives have made modest electoral gains from privatization. However, voters are not consistent in their views about privatizating particular industries, implying the Conservatives may lose votes with future privatization.

A contrast is often drawn between ethics and expediency in politics; however the contrast might be overdrawn. We can hold firmly to the classical notion that politicians should steer society according to some higher values, while retaining the notion of democratic accountability, just so long as electors see the same stars as political leaders do and are as keen to follow them. There are grounds for thinking that this may well be so, either for broadly utilitarian reasons or for basically idealistic ones.

The Social Indicators Movement which emerged in the late 1960s was motivated by a broad and appealing idea. It is important to monitor changes over time in a wide range of quality of life, both for a population as a whole and for its significant subgroups, because such information, when combined with other data, can generate new knowledge about how to increase quality of life through more effective social policies.

Irrespective of views about equity, social insurance has a major efficiency role. Because of technical problems in private markets, neither unemployment nor inflation are risks against which private markets can supply actuarial insurance, and medical insurance cannot cover all risks for all types of individual. The existence of social insurance is therefore supported on the grounds that it does things which private, actuarial insurance would either not do at all or would do inefficiently.

Government is about the supply and demand for many goods and services, but votes or social needs are the principal signal meant to give direction to public policy. Many neo-liberal economists contest this, arguing that charges or user-fees are more efficient for allocating services. Empirical analysis shows that in principle it would be possible to impose charges on three-quarters of the goods and services financed by government. Although some charges are imposed on a wide variety of public programmes, overall governments reject marketing what is marketable. Theoretical inconsistencies in government's use of charges indicate that they reflect political inertia. The conclusion offers an analytic paradigm for interpreting charges, since an accurate interpretation of the signals sent by charges depends upon attributes specific to a given public programme.

Social indicators have not fulfilled their promise, or at least have not lived up to the expectations held of them in the late 1950s and 1960s. Despite the continued growth of social statistics, produced both by governments and other organisations, the aim of producing precise, concise and evaluatively neutral measures of the state of society and of change in society has apparently eluded some of the best minds of the social science and governmental statistics communities. Whereas a wide range of economic indicators and data are readily available, if not without their problems (cf. Johnson, 1988), and integrated into the concepts of economic theory, standard measures of crime, health, well-being, education and many other social characteristics have proven much more difficult to construct and establish as standard yardsticks of social conditions. This note considers some of the reasons for these difficulties. It relates specifically to the aspiration to construct social indicators, not to social statistics more generally (as reviewed in, for example, Carley, 1981).

This essay extends John Kingdon's work on predecision policy processes in US domestic policy to the foreign policy domain. While Kingdon's insights have significantly improved our understanding of predecision processes, further development is necessary for extension across both domestic and foreign policy domains. Kingdon's incremental evolutionary metaphor for alternative specification has to be revamped to include both gradualist and nonincremental policy types. Scholars must also make more explicit, elaborate, and thorough use of Cohen, March and Olsen's ‘garbage can’ model of decision making. To these ends, we offer a typology of policy alternatives that incorporates alternative metaphors premised on recent developments in evolutionary theory. The essay concludes by suggesting a research agenda amenable to pursuit in both national and cross-national contexts.

The signals of the American legislative process cannot be understood simply by focusing on the formal and technical processes of legislative drafting. Rather, it is important to appreciate the political and institutional dynamics which affect how and to whom signals are sent, and why some signals emerging from the legislative process are clearer than others. Legislative policymaking often does not conform to the textbook ideal of deliberation and clarity. By the way that legislation is drafted, through the use of legislative history and various materials, legislators send signals to agencies, courts, their colleagues and interest groups. How bills are drafted - tight or loose - gives institutions more or less authority to make policy. Accounting for the sometimes absence of clear direction in legislation in the American system, and the consequences of that absence for agencies and courts, raises questions in a comparative context about how the structure of government affects the signals of the legislative process.

Frey (1987) proposed a new information policy designed to lower the utility of terrorist action. The policy is predicated on the assumption that terrorists aim to draw public attention to their cause. Therefore, the terrorists' rewards can be reduced by refraining from attributing a particular terrorist act to any one group. Faced with diminished rewards, terrorists are likely to give up violent action or to resort to tactics that put them in greater jeopardy. The present article offers a thorough analysis of Frey's proposal. It shows that the proposal derives from a too limited view of the terrorist strategy and from unrealistic assumptions about the extent to which democratic governments can control the sources and the dissemination of information. A judgment of Frey's proposal according to criteria drawn from a more comprehensive view of the terrorist strategy leads to the conclusion that the proposed policy is both impractical and counterproductive.

We're told a story of how American Indians taught their young to swim: They tied a rope around the youngster and tossed him in the water. Social indicators were tossed into the water without the rope! Without the rope of adequate Federal or private funds for support, social indicators were forced to learn to swim. And swim, they did.

This paper examines the set of norms, rules and institutions (the regime) which regulate the domestic politics of international trade policy in the US. It is particularly concerned to explain the simultaneous occurrence of successful participation in multilateral trade liberalization in the GATT and rising levels of protection via the administered protection mechanisms (e.g. anti-dumping and countervailing duty, and escape clause). The explanation of this phenomenon is the development of a new institutional definition of trade policy that permitted executive dominance of trade policy, in conjunction with a changed perception of the role of trade policy by the executive branch. Specifically, it is argued that post-war executives (at least until Reagan) came to associate trade policy with broader foreign policy goals.

The social indicators movement sought to establish a system of social accounting that was broader than the money-based national income accounts. Specialized studies of social trends in housing, health, crime, and so forth could be successful in illuminating a specific area of social life, but together they became obstacles to the achievement of the ideal of an integrated set of social accounts. Even if crime and housing have a relationship the statistics generated within each domain are together incommensurable.